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The Superfactory Newsletter is published monthly to over 50,000 subscribers. Inside Superfactory About -
Articles  PowerPoint Presentations Lean Manufacturing Lean Overview - 3P - 5S - Jidoka - Kaizen - Value Streams - Visual Factory - Pull - JIT - Kanban - Quick Changeover - Cellular Manufacturing - Standard Work - Theory of Constraints - TPM - TWI Lean Enterprise Quality Business Safety  DVD Videos Training and information videos on a wide variety of lean manufacturing topics. Life in a Workcell - Batchin' - What Lean Means - Kaizen Blitz - Shigeo Shingo - Lean Accounting - ESD - 5S - Quick and Easy Kaizen - Customer Satisfaction - Work Teams - Velocity at Dell - Strategic Planning  Factory Toolbox Over 500 forms, procedure templates, and tools for download. Lean Toolkit - Procedures Toolkit - Quality Toolkit - Tools and Forms Toolkit - Engineering Toolkit - Materials Toolkit - Safety Toolkit - HR Toolkit - Six Sigma Toolkit - Finance Tookit Sponsors
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Volume 10 Issue 7 | July 2009 | www.superfactory.com |
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From the Editor
Now is the time to invest in lean improvements. Check out Gemba Academy, including the four free online video We continue to develop our ".am" series of morning aggregated news websites. The Superfactory LinkedIn group has nearly 3,000 members. If you're a member of LinkedIn, or are interested in - Kevin Meyer |
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Manufacturing Excellence NewsStories of interest to the lean community.
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In the Evolving Excellence BlogJoin over 5,000 readers who get their daily dose of blunt manufacturing and business reality by subscribing to the Evolving Excellence blog!
Recent posts in the Evolving Excellence blog include:
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Upcoming Events
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Featured Book
By Sami Bahri 'What does it really mean to be a learning organization? What does it take to get the people in a nonmanufacturing environment to think of work in terms of flow? How do you build a culture based on lean principles and lead that culture as it continuously evolves? Dr. Sami Bahri describes how he and the staff in his dental practice tackled each of these questions. The book describes how their organization transformed their work and their thinking from a traditional batch approach to one focused directly on the needs of the patient, not on the needs of the practitioners. It explains the technical changes that they made in the way that they scheduled and treated patients, as well as the understanding of the human interactions needed to make this new model succeed. |
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Featured Article
By Michael Ballé, Excellence Systems Group I was recently walking through a factory shop floor that was essentially a machining shop (20-odd mills, drills and turns of varying age and design) with one small assembly cell stuck at the end of the hall. In this cell, the local lean team had worked very hard at implementing all the lean tools and improved quality, productivity and eliminated WIP by going to single piece flow. They were still struggling with regular supply in small containers, for the usual organizational issues with logistics. This was not bad at all, considering the general panic about 20% lower volumes than at this point last year. They’d managed to reduce headcount faster than falling demand, and to do so without traumatizing the operators, who had participated actively to the “lean implementation.” This, right in the middle of a tool shop with mostly idle machines, visibly disgruntled operators, crates of semi-worked parts, half dismembered machines in the midst of equally half-hearted maintenance – the very image of the bad old days of factory life. Here, I thought, I could see the very source of our difficulties with learning lean. What the lean team had done was perfectly right, and also, probably equally useless for the company. It was doing the right thing at the wrong place, and in the wrong way. How do you get out of that hole? For several years, I’ve wondered about the slow rate at lean implementation. Recently, while discussing this topic with a genuine lean hero, Orry Fiume of Wiremold fame and author of Lean Accounting, we even wondered whether lean can be taught at all – coming from two experienced lean instructors, this is pretty scary. In general, such conversations are all about the fact that so few managers are really into doing lean for real – lacking both the motivation and the persistence to go all the way. But what about us instructors? What about the gurus and the consultants? What is our share in the difficulties with the lean transformation. Maybe we’re just teaching this stuff wrong? |
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Featured Evolving Excellence Blog Post
Boeing's About Face Runs Smack into Traditional Accounting Just the other day I told you how Boeing has apparently learned a lesson and is making an about-face on its outsourcing strategy by buying the assembly operations of a key supplier, Vought. Well yesterday the deal happened, and the writeup in the Wall Street Journal itself explains why companies continue to go down the path to outsourcing hell.
Let's repeat some of those negatives, as they'll soon provide the 2x4 we'll use to smack some people upside the head. Cash costs, sprawling supply chain, delays, penalties, concessions, damaged credibility. Pretty expensive, eh? Since it's almost always overlooked, we'll also tack on the human cost of tens of thousands of years of experience, knowledge, and creativity that Boeing shed as part of their outsourcing adventure. But some people just don't see that. In the same article a whiz-bang analyst at Credit Suisse had a slightly different perspective... |
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© 2009 Superfactory by Factory Strategies Group LLC. All Rights Reserved |
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Welcome to the Superfactory Newsletter!
modules on Introduction to Lean, The Ten Commandments of Continuous Improvement, VSM Overview, and 5S Overview. A nine module series on The Seven Deadly Wastes has just been added to the School of Lean.
There are now a total of nine, including 
and 
Follow the Learner
Who Teaches the Teachers?